


Death and the Maiden

by faustish0lurve



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Blood Drinking, Blood and Gore, Dream Sex, M/M, Night Terrors, Sleep Paralysis, Unconventional methods of dealing with your inner demons, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:28:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21749782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faustish0lurve/pseuds/faustish0lurve
Summary: In the aftermath of Pharos, the Angel dreams in scarlet and midnight.
Relationships: Konrad Curze/Sanguinius (WH40k)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 28





	Death and the Maiden

Between the desire  
And the spasm  
Between the potency  
And the existence  
Between the essence  
And the descent  
Falls the Shadow

\--"The Hollow Men", T. S. Eliot

He does not fear sleep, not like his brother does. He is a creature of the Emperor; "of light and honor and hope and glory". He was made to know no fear. But this certainly comes close. If he can still sleep with the familiar image of his own corpse looming over him, he can sleep through this. There's a strange sense of peace in that thought. He needs peace somewhere.

It does not have a consistent beginning, and he is grateful for it. His waking life verges on the mechanical, and the variance in this monstrous pantomime is some strange freedom. The only constant is the bite; so ecstatic in its immediacy that he no longer wonders why his sons fall. He tries not to think about that, more than the rest of the dream. No sense of peace is worth that reminder. Not that he dwells on any of this. Not awake at least.

It takes place in the Fortress of Hera this time. Common enough, but not universal. Sometimes it's the true Imperial Palace, sometimes Mount Seraph, rarely his quarters on the Red Tear. The location is irrelevant, set dressing, important only in that it conveys a further sense of gleeful desecration.

The duel replays or mutates as an occasional preamble. Not necessary, but it gives the affair a flimsy sense of propriety. It's less honest, but it gives his body a passable excuse, even as his mind watches with tacit disapproval. His blood can't throb and his hearts can't spasm without reasonable cause. He rarely remembers this part with any great clarity, and he'd be contrite if he had the depth of feeling to spare.

As dreams do, the image resolves into acute clarity at the crux of the action. Curze is down on the marble floor, somehow pinned despite the superiority of his warplate. He's grinning, genuinely impressed, pleased, and an uncharacteristic warmth colors his voice. Those bright black eyes fall into Sanguinius' own with an impudent directness.

"My my brother," Curze breathes, the wind knocked out of him by the force of the fall, "you've certainly proved me wrong."

He wants to look away, and there's absolutely no reason to. He has the advantage in every sense of the word, and yet those eyes cut through him like bolt shrapnel. A distant prickling sensation informs him that he's bleeding. Curze must have cut him somewhere, although he can't feel the injury itself.

His eyes break away for a moment or two, lost in his own swimming revulsion. There is the muffled, vacuous realization that he cannot move. His fingers clench numbly at Curze's barbed pauldrons. The ringing in his ears and the thunder in his blood cut abruptly out as Curze speaks again.

"I said neither of us could gain the advantage, and yet here I am, a prisoner of your clearly superior skill. Perhaps I am wrong in more ways than one."

Sanguinius' eyes are pulled back to his brother's face as Curze's grin spreads. Corpse thin lips pull apart to reveal dark teeth filed into fangs a mockery of his own. Bluish tint has been replaced by the pink flush of battle, and there's something obscene about this touch of life in otherwise dead flesh.

"Perhaps you have mastered your monstrousness better than I, buried it under layers of nobility and praise. Perhaps this is why I am defamed, and you lifted to angelic heights, despite our common birth. But I do not think so."

Curze lifts his hand of knives, despite the shaking hold Sanguinius has pinned him in. There's an elegance in the gesture, the claws catching in the too-bright light. They come to rest on his cheek, feather light and strangely sincere. The touch burns despite the absence of a power field. He makes no move to draw blood.

"I think, Angel, that you have merely hidden your deformity, while I have mastered mine. I may struggle against fate, but I am not stupid enough to fight my own nature. You, however,"

Here the claws run across his face and through his hair, delicate and worshipful, bloodless. He's unable to break Curze's stare, despite the revulsion vibrating through him. His brother's expression makes it worse; affection and pity mix on features never meant for either.

"You deny yourself so much, and are crippled for it."

The indignation lances through him sharper and harder than his repugnance at the monster below him. He fights for voice despite the shackles of sleep and dream. In a bolt of rage he snatches Curze's gauntleted hand with a snarl and slams it to the floor with a crack of marble. His blood moves faster, his chest heaves for a moment as he turns the glare back on his brother. His pronouncement is calm only in the sense that he does not raise his voice.

"I am not crippled. I deny myself nothing."

Curze laughs brightly, his mood warming with the act of violence. It's a dead sound, despite the sincere amusement.

"Truly?"

Sanguinius feels the sparse arm tense underneath his unshakable, half numb grip. It's more real than his own stumbling response as he fails to counter Curze's renewed grasp on him. With fluid ease that would be, should be impossible in warplate, Curze pulls himself up against the Angel, flush chest to chest. His brother breaks the pin on his thighs, hooks his legs around him, and flips them over in one continuous motion.

He should be crushed by the weight of the armor, fused ribs protesting the sudden resonating force. Instead, there's just the thud of his spine and skull on the stone floor. Curze is, unarmored now, somehow, and frightfully light for all his strength. Sanguinius feels his wings squashed awkwardly beneath him, unable to settle into a natural position.

Curze locks eyes with him again, the closeness more uncomfortable than his pinned wings. That smile flashes again, predatory and more sure of itself. His breath is hot, yet the characteristic reek is curiously absent, like any immediate reality of pain.

"I may lie, but at least I do myself the courtesy of the truth."

Curze shifts his weight, pins Sanguinius' wrist with a raised knee. He's suddenly aware of how much taller Curze is, for all that his brother is made of nothing but rag and bone. Curze brings his free hand to Sanguinius' face in imitation of his previous gesture. It runs slowly across the side of his face, ragged nails catching on stray strands of hair. Curze pulls the strands away from his head as if he's examining spun silk. He wants to shiver at the intimacy of the gesture, but he's frozen again.

"Tell me brother, if beauty is truth, and you are the fairest of us all, how much does it hurt to lie to yourself day after day?" Curze's voice is absentminded as he studies the threads of gold caught in his cracked nails. Sanguinius glares at him in paralyzed offense, unable to argue beyond a wordless growl of dissent. Curze chuckles at the sound, more to himself than anything.

"For that matter, where does it hurt?"

He ceases his examination of the angel's hair with a perfunctory yank on the strands he holds. The same hand travels back to cup the side of the angel's skull, still handling his brother with grossly uncharacteristic delicacy. Running down and across his neck, it pauses to press loosely at his throat. Curze gazes absently into the distance as his hand tenses for a moment.

"Is it in that bleeding heart of yours?"

Sanguinius can feel the intent to crush for a brief second. But those long cold fingers go slack instead. They drag limply to the collar of his robe, which Curze toys with idly.

"I think so."

With a snap of renewed interest, Curze yanks the fistful of robe downward. The ripping of fabric fills the empty audience chamber with an inappropriate loudness. Sanguinius jerks with the force of it, nearly animate for a moment. It's as if the violence of the act has forced the numbness from his body, or at least his torso. He can feel his chest rising and falling again.

Curze's eyes don't leave the Angel's body as he throws the shredded fistful of robe aside.

"When Father made us," he begins, "he blessed us with talents I think many of us take for granted. Oh, not our strength or our resilience; he needed tools that would not break before he conquered the galaxy."

His hand comes to rest splayed on Sanguinius' sternum. Tepid and searching, it traces wide spans up the cage of fused ribs as he continues. Sanguinius shudders in revulsion at the touch, hearts spiking as his skin burns with what must be cascades of combat hormones.

"Our sensory enhancements, those I think we under appreciate. Fulgrim had the right idea when he abandoned reason for the senses. It spared him so much grief after he killed Ferrus."

The words spill up like bile. Sanguinius fights to speak, but he cannot master the emotions to shape them. Rage is comfortably immediate, but abhorrence is foremost. He cannot frame the wrongness of that statement, the crawling disgust that slumps in his leaden limbs. He forces sound from his throat, but it is wordless and blunted.

Curze drags his eyes up from Sanguinius' bared flesh to glare at him.

"Hush, I was going somewhere with all of this."

The edges of his nails skitter over the ridge of Sanguinius' collarbone, uncomfortably close to his throat even before they stop.

"The point, brother, is that you are possessed of talents I lack. Despite our common curses you alone were poisoned with endless thirst."

Here the broken ridge of a nail comes to rest in the hollow of his throat. His pulse burns in his neck as he struggles to keep his breathing even, neck rigid and eyes fixed on Curze.

"I suspect this was deliberate, much as Father gave me madness to compensate for my own terrible sight. But I cannot know for certain, unless you tell me."

"I can tell you nothing."

"Oh, but you can."

Curze's nails shred his chest like rags, parting layers of skin and flesh with careless ease. He doesn't even think to scream. Disconnected from the action, there's no instinct to, and no real connection between the sensation of pain and the slow welling of blood. It simply is.

"You can tell me with the talents bestowed upon us both. If I see Father again before I die I will have to thank him for this."

Curze returns their bodies to their original pin, bends his head to the wound struggling to mend, and drinks. Now the wound chooses to come to life, and now, pinioned on the marble floor, he feels something like real pain. He'd scream now, but for the obscene awareness of Curze's head pushing down on the meat of his ribs.

His breath comes fast and shallow instead, unintentionally helping his brother's fangs continually raze the edges struggling to mend. He can't feel much beyond the spreading, strangling burn of pain, but he can hear the wet slurp of a tongue as his brother laps at his hearts' blood. The pounding of his futile pulse in his own ears comes to eclipse even that. He thrashes against the force of the pin, hideously alive, bleeding, and sincerely terrified.

This is the death his sons have given others. This is the death he himself fears. He's watching it, feeling it, second by second, even as the tunnel vision blurs everything down to an ebon pinprick somewhere on his brother's scalp. Pain-high, keening, and horrendously self aware, he arrives at the realization Curze had failed to bestow on him in words.

"Stop! I understand!" he creaks, barely able to force the shrill breath from his protesting lungs.

His brother pauses, pulls up from the bloody channel in his breast, looks him in the eye. The smile is softer now, warmer, the line of his lips drawn out in ghoulish smears of carmine.

"What do you understand, brother? Share with me."

"I was not made..." he pauses, the words jagged and horrible even here, "my making was not an act of chance. Father produced this defect in me for his own purposes. I was given the grief of my sons' death to," and here is the unspeakable, "to control me."

Curze softens further. "Excellent."

"How is this excellent?!" Sanguinius snaps, still burning with revelation.

"Even if you will not surrender, you have understood the truth of the thing. That is more than I can say for most of our freakish kin. Fulgrim deludes himself and calls it perfection, Magnus believes he can bargain with the inevitable, but you have spoken nothing but truth. I have always admired that in you."

Sanguinius' wrists loosen.

"I would offer you more in exchange for my own greed."

"What?" Sanguinius is more mystified than enraged, worn to bone despite his closing, itching wound.

"Must I give you the vulgar specifics?"

The look in the Angel's eyes tell him yes. Sanguinius' wrist comes free and his brother draws the rank curtain of hair back from his ashen neck. The Angel's eyes widen.

The burning flares again, rage sputtering against exhaustion. The strength to speak comes easier than the strength to move. "You would not."

"I am attempting to be courteous."

"It is not courtesy to taunt me with my deepest flaw!"

"You would not consider it a gift? I have taken from you in the deepest way possible, and I would be poor kin not to return that favor. Here, come."

Curze lifts his free wrist to filed teeth and chews. It's a nasty sound, less immediately horrifying than Curze feasting on his own split breast. There's a mundane repulsion to it instead, an air like the man himself. Sanguinius remains fixed despite this and despite the raw line of his own wound. It's different on someone else, enticing. A repulsive mockery made appealing by his own deviation. Sanguinius bends up to the proffered gash.

"There we are."

Curze makes an expression on contact, but Sanguinius can't interpret it. Pain, surprise, elation, are all possibilities. He can't speak with his mouth full. Things sharpen and blur at once. Curze probably releases his other hand and scoops him up, but the motion comes second to the gift of the thirst. He's aware he's upright now, but only because his head corrects to follow his brother's wrist upward.

His Betcher's gland oozes, cutting into Curze's wound without real need of his teeth, pink sizzling saliva running tracks through the layers of grime and old sweat. Sanguinius can taste old fear and anguish laid down in the fug of salt and dust, prickling against the confirmation of godhood running in and through him. He barely feels his tongue and fangs working, probably could not stop them if he tried. Nothing else in him seems to move. He'd be sputtering if his multilung hadn't kicked in, working to keep him from drowning shallowly in his brother's blood.

Curze doesn't seem to mind, cradles the back of Sanguinius' head as he reels his wrist in closer to his body. The pressure vanishes, and Sanguinius feels something slide against his lips. Fingers, they must be Curze's fingers trying to break the seal against his mouth. Cracked nails drag against his teeth and gums, probing to break suction. Sanguinius tastes mortal blood in traces. It's a moment before he registers the whisper in his ear.

"Let go a moment, I can give you better."

The mangled wound is pulled from him as Curze forces his jaw open. He strains and works against empty air, too surprised and upset to immediately struggle. Curze hushes him gently, coos and strokes the confines of his mouth as a fist gathers at the back of his head. The hand releases, slides from his mouth with one final stroke over fangs born rather than filed.

Curze's fist wraps comfortably tight in his hair, leads him gently and insistently to his own neck. He feels his brother settle his mouth gently into place. He licks tentatively, mouthing his way through grease and dirt. Curze shivers, presses into the grip of the Angel's fangs insistently. Sanguinius bites down.

Without the confines of a shallow wound, Curze flows into him like water. Cytokines surge. Larraman cells struggle to mend against the mutation of fangs. His jaw works without witness to his imperfection. Pain euphoria softens and oozes into other emotions. He lets himself swim blearily in Curze's flesh memory.

The Night Haunter dreams in scarlet and crimson, running a murky thread through the marrow of his bones. His omophagea whispers in old lances of adrenaline, shadows, inhuman grace clad in rags. It promises him that his invincibility is inviolate. That they are truest kin, bound by a legacy of ruin and brutality, and the fear they fail to smother. Dominion pierces his breast. He cannot fall. He is man and animal and god all at once. He cannot be shattered and held to that blinding, golden light.

The Angel shudders under the force of revelation, lets Curze pull him in. His body is barely his own, poseable like a cooling corpse despite singing with fire. Hands tug and pull at him as something slides down his shoulders. There's the sound of fabric ripping again as a soft weight of cloth falls off around his wings. His bite adjusts as hands span down his bare back. Curze sighs softly as he's pierced again. New, thin flesh rubs against the drape of rags. He thinks dimly of Horus.

Curze's blood draws itself more slowly. Sanguinius sucks more out of mutant instinct than an immediate need for satisfaction. Curze pulls the Angel's legs from his own lap and shifts them around his own hips. Sanguinius feels the motion of his legs and the sensation of touch and little else. A hand at the small of his back pulls him in flush and Curze is furiously eager beneath the drift of rags. Dim sounds of surprise break the seal of his bite.

The insistent hand at Sanguinius' back slides lower, cups his ass and really squeezes. Sanguinius moves against the touch out of reflex. He can't recall the last time this happened. After the madness of Signus, no one would want to. His brothers treat him as a fixture of state, and his sons consider him too fragile to touch. That the family pariah would deign to do so is almost an insult.

But it's not, in these circumstances. He works back against Curze with something like impatience. Fangs pull from the scabbing wound. Curze attempts to kiss him. Sanguinius reciprocates, tastes rot and the old blood of men and gods at the back of his brother's mouth. He's willing to make up the difference in skill. Curze licks his own blood from the Angel's fangs with messy enthusiasm.

The rest is remarkably easy. Sanguinius rocks them forward, hand on his brother's hip and dragging whatever Curze is wearing off of his bottom half. Sanguinius kicks away the last puddle of his robes as Curze fumbles off the excuse he calls a tunic. Stark naked in the audience hall of the Fortress of Hera, Sanguinius grinds impatiently and sloppily against his own splintered reflection.

Curze responds enthusiastically, but refuses to push him in any particular direction. They stay locked together, raw, slick, sensitive, for an uncounted number of breaths. It's with a whimper of regret that the angel breaks the grip of Curze's narrow thighs.

It should be difficult to move over his brother, grip him from behind. It should be difficult to turn and manipulate his lanky body, put him up on his knees with his head down. But everything moves again with that dreamlike smoothness. Curze doesn't resist in the slightest. If anything, there's an eagerness in his response. Perhaps the Angel is too forceful in his movements. Perhaps he should not yank and shove. The fist in his brother's hair is tight as he corrects their position. He nudges limbs into place with a curt shove of a knee or a hand.

Curze asks him something, between the small noises of correction and supplication. Sanguinius doesn't hear it at first. Curze asks again, more evenly. "What changed, brother?"

The Angel hesitates for a moment, fumbling for an answer as he readies himself. "I wanted something more."

Sanguinius grips Curze by the scant hip. He pushes in and it's too easy, too smooth, too fluid. The sharp noise from the body below him doesn't sound like pain. It's a long moment before he realizes his own voice is joined in complement. For a creature of sinew and spite, Curze is remarkably solid beneath him. His brother leans in to the force put against him, urging Sanguinius on. It's so easy to gouge at his hips, run dull nails down his flanks and thighs, drive thin lines of red from sooted marble skin. He could bend further forward, drive fangs into scarred shoulder meat, except, except--

Everything is sharp, bright, piercing.

He's shattered by the sound of an unrecognized voice.

"Sire!"

He swims to consciousness flayed by the light of Macragge's sun. The pike like stiffness in his back and his neck tells him he's been paralyzed by sleep yet again. He's flat on his back in bed, dressed only in sweat, wings crumpled beneath him. His body refuses his demand for movement. Instead there's a dim afterimage of pain suffusing his limbs and an insistent, uncomfortable legacy of arousal. It's a frustrating few seconds before he can even move his eyes from the ceiling. His belated gaze slides over to his bodyguard sergeant trying to shake him awake. His jaw works hollowly against his tongue, struggling to shape words with split lips. Why does he still taste blood?

"Sire!" Zuriel's voice is insistent, threaded with filial concern and the weight of uncertainty.

He fumbles for his son's arm with numb fingers. "I am here, Zuriel" he says, half sure of the statement.

"I hesitate to leave my post, lord, but you were screaming. Very loudly."

This again. He sighs in frustration as much as in acknowledgement.

Zuriel glances over him with appraising eyes, clearly expecting some further answer. Instead Sanguinius sits up, shakily, muscles screaming. The sheets stick and drag against his movements. He's aware he looks like warm death. He extends stiff, pins-and-needles wings gingerly in the confines of the small space. Rolling his shoulders experimentally, he flexes his aberrant limbs. The metallic trace lingers stubbornly in his mouth. He speaks the ever present question as if to wipe it away.

"Any news of Azkaellon?"

Zuriel's tone warms a shade, and it heartens the Angel to see his son's demeanor shift. "His dexterity is improving, my lord. Apothecarion should let him go tomorrow."

"Kindly inform the supervising apothecary that I will be present for his discharge. Thank you Zuriel, you may go."

Zuriel hesitates. Sanguinius is unsure quite what expression his son sees in his face, but Zuriel studies him for a long wordless minute before turning to the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Huge shoutout to kolosundil for putting up with me all these years.


End file.
